Experimental feature: Order Exile and Pride from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.

               

Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.48916
EAN: 9780896086050
ISBN: 0896086054
Label: South End Press
Manufacturer: South End Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 160
Publication Date: 1999-09-15
Publisher: South End Press
Studio: South End Press

Contents

The Mountain
1. Place
Clearcut: Explaining the Distance
Losing Home
Clearcut: Brutes and Bumper Stickers
Clearcut: End of the Line
Clearcut: Casino
2. Bodies
Freaks and Queers
Reading Across the Grain
Stones in My Heart, Stones in My Pockets

An Excerpt from Exile and Pride By Eli Clare

Draft Version: Please do not quote

THE MOUNTAIN

I: A Metaphor

The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against the mountain, failed on the mountain, lived in the shadow of the mountain, hit our heads on glass ceilings, tried to climb the class ladder, lost the fight against assimilation, struggled our way toward that phantom called normality?

We hear from the summit that the world is the best from up there. Hear that we are lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, that we live at the bottom precisely because we are those things. We decide to climb that mountain, or make a pact that our children will climb it. The climbing turns out to be unimaginably difficult. We are afraid; every time we look ahead we can find nothing remotely familiar or comfortable. We lose the trail. Our wheelchairs get stuck. We speak the wrong languages with the wrong accents, wear the wrong clothes, carry our bodies the wrong ways, ask the wrong questions, love the wrong people. And it's goddamn lonely up there on the mountain. We decide to stop climbing and build a new house right where we are. Or we decide to climb back down to the people we love where the food, the clothes, the dirt, the sidewalk, the steaming asphalt under our feet, our crutches all feel right. Or we find the path again, decide to continue climbing only to have the very people who told us how wonderful life is at the summit booby trap the trail. They burn the bridge over the impassable canyon. They redraw our topo maps so that we end up walking in circles. They send their goons-those working-class and poor people they employ as their official brutes-to push us over the edge. Maybe we get to the summit but p

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Brings the hybridity of living...
Review: This book was required reading for a class on countering oppressions. It is a beautiful story of the mixity of living with multiple marginalized ways of being in the world. In particular, it relays the story of oppression through looking at embodied ways of existence. What does it mean to live in the world and how do we heal from systems that continually go against the embodied experiences of so many of us. Zi is a powerful author with great descriptive imagery. I highly recommend this book!

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: This book changed my life
Review: This is an excellent book for disabled queers like myself, and the author, Eli Clare. The book is easily read--Clare uses language that is not pretentious, but establishes a voice that is eloquently compelling. "Exile" masquerades as autobiographical but contains a powerful critique of the social constructions of class, disability, sexuality, race, gender, the environment and just about everything else you could imagine (I know this might seem impossible--but Clare accomplishes it in this wonderful book). I highly recommend this book.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Invitation into Experience
Review: Clare writes her autobiography in word paintings. Clare explores the multiple differences of disability, queerness, transgenderism, abuse, socioeconomic class, and gender with reflection that empowers rather than victimizes or blames. While considering how the history around her has shaped the world and affected who she is, she considers how she has shaped the world. Clare refuses to collapse the intricate complexities of life into something more managable.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: a good title...
Review: I read this book in an 'images of women' course, and i found the title very interesting....but little else. I felt that this book was predictable and, while it contains a nice story, did not relete well to me. It was dense and hard to follow.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: wow! great book
Review: I found this book really interesting. Her writing style is beautiful, and she has an almost poetical style in places.

Eli is a disabled woman. She has cerebral palsy. She talks about the exclusion she experienced - the exile - in a rural town in Oregon. She also talks about being abused, and this deeply personal story is very powerful.

Eli also feels in exile because she is an environmentalist - from a rural background. Among environmentalist, she feels an outsider, since most of them are city people.

Eli is also a lesbian. She has felt excluded from that community too.

Although I haven't done it justice by listing all the things she feels exile from, this is not a negative book. It is actually a very positive book - it talks abuot developing pride in who you are, accepting yourself, being a preson with lots of layers to their personality, etc

Eli also talks about wider issues - like the social model of disability, pressure to be a "supercrip", disclosing rape and being rejected by your family when you do so, etc.

When I finished the book, I decided to read it again, straight away so that I didn't forget what it said. (I have memory problems). I live in Australia, and this woman lives in Oregon. But after reading this book, I just wished I could meet her. And I think that's one of the best recommmendations you can give a book!

---

---